LOOKING AT SOMETHING

[Koontz John E]

I don't have anything to add to Bob's comments on cross-branch
comparisons.

On Fri, 20 Oct 2006 goodtracks at peoplepc.com wrote:

> In IOM, there is:
> wanda,     look at something &
> wanwanda,     go look at (see) s.t.
> (Words recorded by LWRobinson)
>
> I havent checked the stories for examples of use, but I am uncertain of
> proper conjugation.  It seems odd and non-compliant to anticipated
> compound words.  The nasal does not seem to belong here.  "anda"  = hin-
> (me) + ada' (see).

Agreed on the strangeness of the nasality if this is wa-a-da 'one looks at
something indefinite'.  Occasionally things are spuriously nasalized or
not nasalized here or there in comparisons between Winnebago or IO and
other languages.

In this case the unexpected nasal might be in a particular inflectional
form, if this is just an entry for wa-a-da.   Bob seems to have
encountered both oral and nasal variants.

In OP I seem to recall cases where expected aN-wa- or aN-waN- Agt1 +
Indefinite appears as a-waN-.  I have never known if this was a rigid
feature of the development in OP or just par for the course in producing
and hearing an underlying |[aN-waN-]|.

The form waNwaNda seems to suggest reduplication of a stem waNda.  Maybe
this isn't from wa-a-da at all.  Maybe it's an special verb waNda?  I
guess verbs that end in -a are a bit rare, and that tends to reinforce the
association with the root a-da < *a...ta, which does behave in Siouan
(where it occurs) like a locative verb.

The gloss 'go and see' for waNwaNda may provide a hint at the morphology
here.  It's perfectly possible to form compounds with glosses like that in
most Siouan langauges, but what's the formation here?   There's a position
we in IO that seems to appear where Dhegiha has /he/ or /kHe/.

> Wn/Hochnk seem little help here, as all I found was (Miner):
> -look at/ see = horug^uch' ~horug^u'ich ~~horug^ich'

This looks like a rather different form on the order of *o-ru-ghit-e ~
*o-ru-ghut-e.  I guess this might match OP udhighide (LaFlesche Uthixide),
someone we know.  In Dakotan it would be a hypothetical (?) oyughuta.

This might be a good place to recall the OP interjection (h)iNda(kHe)
'let's see' which looks to me flat out like a borrowing of IO hiN-a-da 'we
see it' (not sure of the surface form) plus the IO male declarative kHe.
A bit like saying 'voi-la' in English, but the acrolect or whatever it
would be is IO instead of French.